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I think he's assuming that since it's actually rewritten flash-memory bits that degrade, if you don't delete data, then you don't rewrite. So without deletes, all writes simply fill more of the drive and you shouldn't see degradation.

Modern flash drives do indeed try to level the writes across all bits, but he's talking about work-loads that don't rewrite at all.

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I wouldn't call an application that writes once and never deletes anything on the hard drive a write-intensive workload. Filling up a SSD with write-once data means paying well over 50¢/GB for your writes, which isn't something you can do if you are "write-intensive" -- if you're writing 100x the capacity of the drive over its lifetime, then you are really write-intensive, at which point the distinction between delete-intensive and write-intensive is nearly nonexistent for obvious reasons.

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